EXPLORE OUR RESEARCH
Few teacher residencies nationwide prioritize critically-conscious and Black teacher retention. CREATE is making strides in this research field!
CREATE is leading in employing scholars of color, with critical research orientations to lead our research efforts.
Practices and Processes
We prioritize critical theories and teacher education research as a guiding tool to drive our research toward intersectional justice. Our work utilizes democratic practices/processes that encourage multivocality while also developing new "onto-epistemologies" (ways of knowing-in-being and being-in-knowing), pushing current boundaries to explore more expansive notions of what it means to be an educator.
Experience some of our published research below. At CREATE, we work hard to create a variety of research experiences, including arts-based and multimodal works alongside academic papers. Additionally, it is essential to our philosophy of change that we critically examine our work and offer our lessons learned to the field. We share critical research here to acknowledge our own learning and share how we’ve responded to shifts over time.
The CREATE research team ensures a communal understanding of how CREATE operates as a “research garden,” leading to deeper trust and expansive participation, which includes question ideation/generation, engagement as a participant and a commitment to using emerging results to inform/shift program practices. We use the term “research garden” to acknowledge indigenous and Africanist epistemes in how we conduct research and engage with participants.
We create projects that emphasize hybrid/democratic forms of research participation (anti-hierarchical) and project orientations (multivocality and multiplicity of scales) that are desire based (anti-deficit framing) and work in service of and for our most marginalized communities.
This work is about maximizing individual agency and encouraging democratic participation in working in service of freedom.
CREATE researchers ensure that our research questions and design specifically help us understand the if/why/how of CREATE (program, team, teachers, mentors) that embodies and is achieving the continuum of justice-centered and abolition teaching ideology, curriculum, practice and outcomes in our specific socio-political-cultural context of Atlanta with Black and POC children and communities.
CREATE researchers generate a variety of multimodal, critically oriented products in the form of academic papers, arts-based research products, tools for teacher practice, community dialogue circles and/or podcasts/YouTube videos that are accessible.
CREATE doctoral research fellows receive intensive research training through coursework and field-based research experiences led by CREATE research faculty. Fellows will work in a cohort to develop criticality as scholars, develop skills in qualitative research design and data collection, and use critical theories such as Black crit, critical race theory and anti-Blackness, among others. Fellows will also collaboratively learn how to navigate and thrive through the doctoral program, publication processes and the academic job market.
Contact Us
CREATE Co-Directors
- Dana E. Salter, M.Ed. - Director of Community Engagement and Continuing Education
- Flavia Gordon-Gunter, Ed.S. - Director of Residency
- LaCretia Plane, MBA - Director of Sustainability and Operations
- Stephanie Behm Cross, Ph.D. - Principal Investigator
- Thomas Albright, Ph.D. - Director of Research
30 Pryor St. SW
Atlanta, GA 30303